Reamde

“And then you skinned it?”

No, it politely climbed out of its own pelt before giving up the ghost. Richard was finding it more and more difficult to resist firing off snappy rejoinders. Only the Furious Muses were holding him at bay.

“I carried it on my back across the United States border,” Richard heard himself explaining. “With the skull and everything, it weighed about half as much as I did at that age.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Because it was illegal. Not shooting the bear. That’s okay, if it’s self-defense. But then you’re supposed to turn it over to the authorities.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Peter, figuring it out, “otherwise, people would just go out and kill bears. They would claim it was self-defense and keep the trophies.”

“How far was it?”

“Two hundred miles.”

“You must have wanted it pretty bad!”

“I didn’t.”

“Why did you carry it on your back two hundred miles then?”

“Because the client wanted it.”

“I’m confused!” Vicki complained, as if her emotional state were really the important thing here. “You did that just for the client?”

“It’s the opposite of that!” Zula said, slightly indignant.

Peter said, “Wait a sec. The bear attacked you and your client—”

“I’ll tell the story!” Richard announced, holding up a hand. He didn’t want it told, wished it hadn’t come up in the first place. But it was the only story he had about himself that he could tell in decent company, and if it were going to be told, he wanted to do it himself. “The client’s dog started it. Hassled the poor bear. The bear picked the dog up in its jaws and started shaking it like a squirrel.”

“Was it like a poodle or something?” Vicki asked.

“It was an eighty-pound golden lab,” Richard said.

“Ohmygod!”

“That is kind of what I was saying. When the lab stopped struggling, which didn’t take long, the bear tossed it into the bushes and advanced on us like If you had anything whatsoever to do with that fucking dog, you’re dead. That’s when the shooting happened.”

Peter snorted at this choice of phrase.

“There was no bravery involved, if that’s what you’re thinking. There was only one climbable tree. The client was not setting any speed records getting up it. We couldn’t both climb it at the same time, is all I’m saying. And not even a horse can outrun a grizzly. I was just standing there with a slug gun. What was I going to do?”

Silence, as they considered the rhetorical question.

“Slug gun?” Zula asked, dropping into engineer mode.

“A twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with slugs rather than shells. Optimized for this one purpose. Two barrels, side by side: an Elmer Fudd special. So I went down on one knee because I was shaking so badly and emptied it into the bear. The bear ran away and died a few hundred yards from our camp. We went and found the carcass. The client wanted the skin. I told him it was illegal. He offered me money to do this thing for him. So I started skinning it. This took days. A horrible job. Butchering even domesticated, farm-bred animals is pretty unspeakable, which is why we bring Mexicans to Iowa to do it,” said Richard, warming to the task, “but a bear is worse. It’s gamy.” This word had no punch at all. It was one of those words that everyone had heard but no one knew really what it meant. “It has almost a fishy smell to it. It’s like you’re being just steeped in the thing’s hormones.”

Vicki shuddered. He considered getting into detail about the physical dimensions of a grizzly bear’s testicles, but, judging from her body language, he’d already driven the point home firmly enough.

Actually, he had been tempted to rush the job of skinning the grizzly. But the problem was that he started with the claws. And he remembered from his boyhood reading about the Lakota braves taking the claws off after they’d killed the bear as a rite of manhood, making them into a necklace. Boys of his vintage took that stuff seriously; he knew as much about Crazy Horse as a man of an earlier generation might have known about Caesar. So he felt compelled to go about the job in a sacred way. Having begun it thus, he could not find the right moment to switch into rough butchery mode.